OCR immigrant experience advice

Hello! First of all, thanks so much for posting something! It's cool to see students starting to use this place as intended!

Now, let's get on with the answers to your questions!

I love teaching the Immigrant Experience! I know it's so rare that a school does it, but it's such a good one, so it's nice to see someone else doing it.

The first thing I want to say is that there are definitely genre conventions to Immigrant Experience literature. You should hinge your answers to the extract-based questions on those.

Here are the ones we use:

• Cultural duality: exploring the tension between the original culture and host cultures. Characters have to navigate dual identities, or dual aspects of their identity, and struggle to reconcile their heritage with their new environment.
• Cultural hybridity: Immigrant Experience literature often explores how characters blend their old and new cultures to create something new. They create hybrid identities that incorporate elements of both the original culture and the culture of the host country.
• Double alienation: Because of the cultural hybridity that comes from being an immigrant, characters tend to feel alienated both by their host culture and their original culture. They tend to be too much like their original culture to be truly seen as part of their new culture, but also too much like their new culture to be fully embraced as a member of their old one.
• Search for belonging: characters in Immigrant Experience literature grapple with feelings of alienation, homesickness, and the desire to belong in both their original and new cultures.
• Orientalism: based on the work of Edward Said, it's the idea that the West/the colonial powers invented their own understanding of what the East/the colonised subjects' countries were like. This is mainly based on Eastern countries, particularly the Middle East (as Said is Palestinian), but also includes North Africa and East Asia. It's a good one for The Reluctant Fundamentalist, particularly with the way Erica and her family treat Changez. It would take more than this tiny bullet point to fully explain it, though!
• Double consciousness: this one is from W E B Du Bois, and it's about African American experiences. However, I think it can be expanded really well to all immigrants! It's about how black people in America have to get used to seeing themselves through the eyes of other people – through the eyes of the people from the dominant culture. Think of how black boys are told to be careful how they play because they could be perceived as threatening. The same is true in general for immigrants, especially those from countries that tend to become racialised. If you talk about this one, do mention that it's an expansion of an idea originally for African American people (who are not immigrants)! Good AO3 and AO5 in there!
• Transnationalism: focusing on how immigrants stay connected to their original country in many different ways. For example, travel, cultural practices and traditions, and communication.
• Diasporic conservatism or frozen identity: immigrants tend to be more conservative with their original culture's traditions and religious practices. While their original culture updates with the times, their version of their original culture is like a 'snapshot' stuck in time. So when they interact with people from their original culture, these immigrants tend to be more conservative.
• Double colonisation: female characters tend to experience two different types of colonisation simultaneously. They are colonised by the white coloniser (usually the ancestors of people in the host country) for their ethnicity and nationality. Then, their bodies are colonised by the men in their homes.

There are plenty of others, but this is getting a little long! So I might put together a PDF with all the ideas in it at some point!

With the unseen extract, the best kind of AO3 is one that incorporates AO5 in it, like I just did with Du Bois and Said, for example! The point is to notice these big conventions and talk about how they come up in the extract, how this compares to other similar texts you've read, and then expand out at the end of the paragraph to talk about how some specific critic confirms or conceptualises the things you're talking about.

The nature of Immigrant Experience texts means that there aren't too many people who talk about the text directly. The good thing about OCR and AO5 in general, though, is that you don't have to just rely on direct quotes from critics! In fact, I'd argue that it's usually done the worst out of all the different types of AO5 you can do. Why? Well, because people tend to just name-drop and then dump the quote in without actually engaging with it! My advice is to try using ideas that people express that aren't related to the text directly. Create a bank of things that people say (e.g. Edward Said and Orientalism) and then paraphrase their ideas and explain how they fit into what you've said. There are, of course, other types of AO5. I've made a whole post about it.

You might also want to check out my Immigrant Experience AO5 book list on Bookshop.org! There are some great books in there! My recommendation is to actually read the Connell Guides book on Lonely Londoners. I know it's not one of the books from the list that your school has chosen, but there's some great stuff in there that you can use! Lonely Londoners is also just a very short book if you'd like to read the actual thing. It helps with AO3 for Small Island. (Disclosure: I do make money every time someone buys something from Bookshop.org through my link).

Also, other book context is the strongest type of context! I don't know why, but students are obsessed with the author's biographical context when it's not that powerful! Literary context is the best one! The other one you should learn, though, is the general periods of immigration that have happened. Of course, people are always immigrating to different countries, but there are distinct 'waves' or 'eras' that it's useful to be aware of, because the likelihood is that your extract is either set during or inspired by one of those waves.

• Windrush Generation in the UK, as well as the South Asian counterpart happening at the same time.
• The immigration of Irish Immigrants as a result of the Famine in the 1840s and 1850s to America as well as Australia and places in the UK such as Liverpool
• The early 1900s influx of Jewish immigrants to Ellis Island in New York. They were escaping persecution in Europe.
• The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 in America, which created an immigration preference system. There had been discrimination against the immigration of Asians before this, particularly in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. America had banned immigration from places like India and China during that time and also denied citizenship to the people who were already there. Then in 1965, they allowed Asians and Eastern Europeans to come back in, but specifically if they met certain criteria. The focus was on education, people with professional careers and people being reunited with family members. So, lots of the people who came from Asia and Africa after this point tended to be middle class or upper-middle class with very high levels of education. This is where we get a lot of the ideas about Asian intelligence from, for example! It also helps us to contextualise Changez a little more. It's also a really nice comparison to what was happening in the UK around the same time in Small Island, where people from the Caribbean are coming for opportunity, and there is much less of an emphasis on them already having money and education. After all, the British needed the Caribbeans to help with blue-collar jobs just as much as they needed nurses and other healthcare professionals in the newly-established NHS! In fact, they probably needed more people doing manual labour!

With your extract-based piece, I would say your best bet for revision is to take the conventions I bullet-pointed above (as well as any others you can think of) and ask yourself, 'What would these things look like in language?' So by that, I mean, think about what kinds of metaphors people might use if they're feeling cultural hybridity or double alienation, for example! What kinds of linguistic features would you notice? Is it code switching? What kinds of symbols would you find? If someone feels othered, what language are they likely to use? Then, you can easily create one paragraph per convention that you've noticed in the actual exam and pick out all the different linguistic features you've noticed.

I hope this helped!